Everybody seems to be talking about today’s subway fuckups and awful morning commutes. And while our little bit of Frances may not come anywhere near as troubling as what Florida went through, surprise, surprise — I have my own story of a hellish morning.
Door-to-door, home-to-work, on a good day with all the trains running as if they know when I’m getting to the stop, it takes me 20 minutes. On a terrible day, when I have to wait and maybe even transfer from one train to another, 35 minutes. On average, 25-30. Today took over an hour.
I started at the 81st Street/CPW B/C downtown stop. Often, I’ll just wait for the B which is nice enough to let me off basically right under my place of employment on 42nd and 6th. But because of a B problem yesterday, I decided to hop on the C which showed first and transfer at Columbus Circle.
The first indication to me there was anything wrong was when I got of the C and saw an F sitting on the A-Train track, which is only weird becaue the F doesn’t stop at Columbus Circle. Suddenly, I managed to understand an announcement over the PA saying that all B & D trains had been diverted to 8th Avenue, so I figured I’d hop on to a 1 or 9 to Times Square. I walked the length of the platform, up the stairs towards the 1/9 only to find the next stairs blocked by red tape. I turned around toward the ramp for the downtown 1/9, this time discovering one of NYPD’s finest standing there repeating to everybody who makes the turn, “No trains.”
“There are no 1 or 9 trains at all,” I ask?
“Nope.”
So back down I go to catch another C … or whatever will get me to 42nd and 8th, which would give me an additional, lovely, nearly-1/2-mile walk to work. Did I mention that Columbus Circle was hovering around 250% humidity? I was shocked that thunderstorms weren’t breaking out underground.
I got on the C, and off we were to 50th Street. No problems. Off we went to 42nd Street. Off we go. Here we go. Here we stop. Somewhere under, oh I don’t know, 48th Street maybe, we took a little break and our train took a little nap. Since all the 6th Avenue service was being diverted to 8th Avenue, there seemed to be several trains ahead of us. After 15 winks or so, we started up again and just 5 minutes later, we slowly pulled into the station.
Never mind that a few minutes into the nap I suddenly had that urge to find a toilet. Never mind that my yesterday my foot inexplicably decided that it didn’t like the rest of me anymore so it would decide to create extreme pain at the most inopportune moments. I struggled the two long avenues over to my hated little place of employment, and only 65 minutes after leaving the comfortable confines of my apartment, I was staring at this screen.
Thanks for solving some of those flooding problems after only 100 years, MTA. Can’t wait for the fare increases.
Out of Focus 